Art of the American Twenties

How did American artists represent the Jazz Age? This is the question that forms the core of a new exhibition, entitled ‘Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties’, on view at Brooklyn Museum.

An explanatory note illustrates how it brings together for the first time the work of sixty-eight painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new mode of modern realism in the years bounded by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. There are works by artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Demuth, Aaron Douglas, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Luigi Lucioni, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.

Throughout the 1920s, these artists created images of liberated modern bodies and the changing urban-industrial environment with an eye toward ideal form and ordered clarity—qualities seemingly at odds with a riotous decade best remembered for its flappers and Fords. They took as their subjects uninhibited nudes and close-up portraits that celebrated sexual freedom and visual intimacy, as if in defiance of the restrictive routines of automated labor and the stresses of modern urban life.

Reserving judgment on the ultimate effects of machine culture on the individual, they distilled cities and factories into pristine geometric compositions that appear silent and uninhabited. American artists of the Jazz Age struggled to express the experience of a dramatically remade modern world, demonstrating their faith in the potentiality of youth and in the sustaining value of beauty.

Among the works on view is ‘Two Women, 1924’ (Oil on canvas) by George Wesley Bellows, an homage to an Italian Renaissance painting in which a nude and a clothed figure are paired to contrast pure love (unclothed) with its worldly counterpart. On the other hand, for all of its ties to the Italian Renaissance profile portraits that Joseph Stella deeply admired, ‘The Amazon’ more immediately evokes American movie goddesses and the glamorous exemplars of American fashion featured in ubiquitous magazine ads.

A passionate advocate of jazz as a new mode of African American expression based in deep emotions and black cultural traditions, Aaron Douglas pictured a scene of rhythm-induced abandon in ‘Congo’, an illustration for the novel Black Magic, in which the French writer Paul Morand exploited the primitivist vogue for its sensationalism.